You Don’t Like Bikes on Sidewalks? Well, “Then Put a Flippin Bike Lane on Divisadero!”

[UPDATE: Oops. Speaking of which, there are a lot of different possibilities for Oak betwixt Baker and Scott. Taking out the parking lane on the south side of Oak is an idea. In the meantime, take the lane. Or head up Baker to Fulton to Divis to McAllister and then roll all the way down to Mid Market and beyond – that way you avoid the horrible part of Octavia and SFPD bike enforcement actions, etc…]

Now that’s interesting because the City, instead of just taking out the useless median on Divisadero, well, the Powers That Be, the City Family, actually went in there a few years back and made the median wider so now there’s less room for bike riders.

So sure, ride your bike on the wide sidewalks of Divis. I mean, I seriously doubt you’ll ever get a ticket.

Or “take the lane,” it’s your choice. (But I don’t advise taking the lane on Divisadero, uphill or down, personally.)

So, how do we fix the horrible thing our City Family and the Livable City movement just inflicted on the Commonweal?

Well, how about narrowing the fast lane to make the slow lane wider?

Or, how about narrowing the median to the width you’ll find north of Geary and then taking out the useless vegetation?

Or, how about just taking out the whole damn useless median? What’s that, it would cost $$$ to move the light standards? Well, get some money from the Feds. Didn’t they just pay money to fuck up Divisadero just a few years back? I think so. So maybe they’d pay to take the light standards out of the middle of the street and put them in the comparatively wide sidewalks of Divis. You know, shovel ready, jobs jobs jobs! What’s that, local businesses and area NIMBYs and real estate interests prefer the trees in the useless median and other aesthetic stuff? Well, who put them in charge?

(Or, maybe we could narrow the wide sidewalks, but that would cost even more.)

So maybe Divis doesn’t deserve a bike lane, but how about just giving back the space that was taken for useless trees?

This entry was posted on Monday, October 10th, 2011 at 9:25 am and is filed under bikes, cars. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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She didn’t do her homework; there’s plenty of space on Scott Street, and except for some elevation between Fulton and Golden Gate, it’s relatively flat.
Why doesn’t she demand a moving sidewalk, so she doesn’t have to pedal?

Like a lot of streets in SF, the only way you can put a bike lane on Divisadero is by either taking away a traffic lane of street parking. Neither is feasible, since street parking is precious in the area and the street has too much traffic to consider taking away a lane.

I live in this neighborhood, and Divis is a terrible place to bike. Thankfully we can just use the bike lanes on Scott street. And Page is a well-traveled bike corridor just parallel to Oak, which is a deadly hell-river of cars, so I’m not sure why there is so much frustration in this article as there are two perfect alternatives to the streets mentioned.

Page is ok, except that there’s a steep hill between Broderick and Divis, and there’s a steep hill down Baker connecting it to the Panhandle. What makes those hills worse is that they end right on cross-streets with heavy traffic, making them very stressful to ride on. And most people vastly prefer the Panhandle, where you don’t have to deal with cars and cross traffic, to Page, where you do. I don’t mind it that much myself, but I’ve been talking to some people– one 60-year-old and one novice– and they would rather take the sidewalk on Oak than Page. And I don’t blame them, but I do think it’s a failure of design.